In addition to lacking a conscience, a San Francisco-area librarian certainly has need for an imagination.

The ABC affiliate in the San Francisco-Oakland communities reported this week that Carmen Martinez, director of the Alameda County Library, owned up to throwing awa 172,000 books in the last two years.

People found some of them recently and raised cain. They said the throw-aways included some works that had been published in the last four or five years, including a biography of Willie Mays.

The controversy surfaced this week when Martinez met with angry patrons.

Gosh, she said, what was I supposed to do? I have to buy new books and I don't have new shelving. Something's gotta give.

Apparently Ms. Martinez operates in a vacuum. This problem faces every single library on the face of the planet. Old stuff has to go away to make room for new stuff.

So, why not do what we do:

A. Have a Friends of the Library book sale where you can get rid of a lot of the old books and make some money;

B. Have an area in the library where you regulary sell books and, again, make a little money;

C. Have a shelf in the library where you just give books away free of charge.

And I'm kind of glad in a way that it did not win big at the Oscars last night.

Why?

I don't think people who present "history" but deliberately distort parts of it for their own purposes should be rewarded.

I never cared for Oliver Stone's approach to movie-making, either, taking historical "facts" and messing with them.

The problem with "Selma" was its portrayal of the role of Lyndon B. Johnson in getting civil rights legislation passed. The movie makes Johnson into a bad guy. The fact is, he was the good guy in terms of the promotion of civil rights, period.

I'm concerned about all of this because I've long felt that people believe more about the history they see in movies than they do in what they read or hear elsewhere.

My "feeling" is apparently well justified by the facts uncovered by memory scientists.

Jeffrey M. Zacks, a professor at a St. Louis university, wrote an op-ed piece published in The New York Times on Feb. 15 establishing that movie "facts" about history do prevail when people try to remember what happened.

"Studies show that if you watch a film -- even one concerning historical events about which you are informed -- your beliefs may be reshaped by 'facts' that are not factual," he writes.

And then he points out that research also shows that there is not much that can be done to undo those "facts" after the fact, as it were.

The Washington Post published a story on Feb. 22 with some surprising information. Turns out that studies show that young people prefer books to digital materials when it comes to reading in certain situations.

For example, "A University of Washington pilot study of digial textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free."

What?

Seems that students like books because they can focus more on reading them and comprehending what is in them. Digital devices seem to be too distracting.

People seem to be accustomed to scanning and skimming online, not actually "reading."

Still, some online science and math texts are preferred by students and teachers because the materials are actually portals to more granular offerings that help the users solve problems.

I wonder about the reading habits of much younger kids, though. Will they like books as much as their big brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers and grandparents?